Hostel Holidays are the best holidays.  You meet friends from all over the world and share a special time together.  It’s an incredible opportunity for travelers to learn about new holidays they don’t celebrate at home.  Sharing holidays is an important part of cultural exchange.  It creates a bond between the traveler and the local that becomes the base of friendship.  Having activities like these are what makes great hostels great.

American Thanksgiving is a fun way for skinny backpackers get some nourishment.

Take Thanksgiving for instance– it’s a great hostel holiday.  It’s so much fun to cook a huge feast of all your childhood favorites and show the other backpackers what they’ve been missing out on their whole lives.  This year we are planning a food and wine buffet at Yim Yam Hostel & Garden in Bangkok.  Mashed potatoes are of course the most important part, with lots of butter and salt.

American Thanksgiving, hostel style!

While Carrie was working at a hostel on Christmas in San Diego they would have a special free breakfast buffet with champagne mimosas, then do the “present ball” game with dollar store gifts!  You could also do a white elephant gift exchange, creating mayhem by swapping and stealing each others presents.  It always turns into a bunch of laughing and merry hooting and hollering.  Getting some free drinks into your customers is a good way to start the holiday off right!  This is why hostel holidays are the best!

Christmas Cookie Decorating!

As a local, it’s nice to keep travelers up to date on the upcoming holidays – especially if it involves stores closing or transportation headaches.  One of our craziest holiday experiences while traveling was when we were in Morocco for Eid al Fitr.  Eid is the biggest holiday of the year for Muslim families.  Signifying the end of the Ramadan fasting period, Eid is the yearly giant feast.  Most families will purchase a sheep which is slaughtered on the morning of the feast.  The week before the feast it’s a sight to behold with sheep being shuffled around all over the city.  There were sheep on the backs of motorbikes, parking lots turned into temporary “sheep parking”, and sheep just about everywhere.  We walked into the apartment complex where we were CouchSurfing.  Our host sniffed the air like “What’s that smell?” and tried to open the basement door.  “Sheep parking in the basement!“, he realized.  We called it the sheep genocide.  The festival impacted where in Morocco we could travel as the bus tickets were almost all purchased by locals in advance.  We ended up having to change most of our trip but since we’re flexible we still had fun.

You should also create events for your guests around the holidays.  If there is a Christmas parade in town, take them to go see it!  Free food for a Buddhist vegetarian festival?  Make signs and organize a tour there!  Contact us at globaltravelernetworks@gmail.com for more tips on hostel activities and how you can make your hostel holidays great!